


come lay yourself down beside me baby (i swear i won't bite)

by theumbrellamancan (meganwastaken)



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Serial Killers, M/M, Minor Character Death, Serial Killers, an attempt at creepy shit, assumed mental health issues kinda?, but anyway, but not in a healthy way kiddos, esp seeing as one of them doesnt know hes in the r/s ya feel me, hella violence, like i dont wanna give spoilers but this aint exactly gonna be the posterchild for a wholesome r/s, tagged ry/shane, tags will be updated as i drag you on this (hopefully) wild ride kiddos
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-05-15
Packaged: 2019-04-16 13:43:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14166114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meganwastaken/pseuds/theumbrellamancan
Summary: Shane Madej sees the shadows out of the corner of his eye, hears the creaks in the dead silence of the night, and he knows two things: there is someone in his house, and no one believes him.





	1. origin

**Author's Note:**

> this chapter is vaguely inspired by the following prompt from writing-prompt-s on tumblr: 'a psychotic killer gets more than he bargained for when the kids he planned on terrorizing turn out to be far more bloodthirsty than him.'  
> the rest of this fic is based off of me screaming headcanons for a new au at MercurySkies in the wee hours of the night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Similar to the way every frat party must have a beer pong champion, there must also be a champion mass murderer.

Almost every horror movie with college kids has the same sort of plot. Invariably, there’s the popular joke and his gorgeous blonde girlfriend, who’s probably cheating on him with his best friend, who is also a jock. Jock McGee hosts a party at his parents' lake house some night over spring break, and everyone who’s everyone is there, and even some people who aren’t anybody but dear god do they want to be.

(The man standing on the back patio knows how it feels to want to be somebody.)

So, the party gets into full swing and there’s a drunken orgy in one room and someone drowning in the pool and the entire football team doing kegstands in the lounge, and a bunch of kids head home or off for a bender elsewhere before people just start to mysteriously _disappear._ And no one really notices, because it’s a party, what do you expect, until someone tries to strike up a conversation with the hot chick slumped over on the stairs and takes ten minutes to realise that her eyes are closed for a reason, and she’s less unconscious and more dead.

And then all hell breaks loose because who could do such a thing, who could have killed her, and then people notice their missing friends – _finally_ – and more bodies are found and holy fuck, there’s a killer in the house. Then, instead of doing the sensible thing and maybe fucking leaving, everyone decides to hang around and try to take on a mass murderer because that’s what kids in horror movies do. And they can’t call the cops because of course the lake house is out somewhere with no cell reception, and our killer was smart enough to cut the phone line so the landline is bust, and there’s no neighbours for miles around, and maybe he cuts the electricity lines or breaks the fuse box now too for the fucking craic, because what better way to finish off a grand revelation than with a blackout. So, a bunch of teens or maybe early-twenty-somethings are stuck in a house together because they’re too stupid to do the sensible thing, and people start getting paranoid and splintering off, and that just makes everything easier for our killer as he picks them off one by one in increasingly more gruesome and dramatic fashion.

Then we have the final confrontation: after Jock McGee’s girlfriend and best friend sneak off for a shag somewhere (because nothing gets that libido going like the stench of death) and are promptly decapitated or some shit, Jockie boy decides to have it out with our killer out of some twisted sense of loyalty and heartbreak. Jockie boy is coincidentally also now the only non-murderer character left, despite having no discernible talent or skill that could potentially save his life other than being a wall of muscle with about three brain cells. He battles his new arch nemesis on one of the upper floors, or sometimes near the pool, and gets a lucky shove in and whoopsie, out the window our killer goes, or into the pool where he apparently drowns. Somehow the cops then arrive, and our hero runs out onto the front garden to meet them, and goes to show them where the body is but that’s gone now and looks like our killer wasn’t dead after all, sport, eh?

(Of course, there is the alternate plot, where Jock McGee’s girlfriend is Faithful As Fuck and survives to the end with him, screaming and crying and generally overreacting the entire time. The man in the mask on the back patio doesn’t think that’s how tonight will go though, judging by the way the blonde cheerleader hanging off the main man’s arm keeps looking at his Best Bro.)

And then our hero rehabilitates himself into society and gets over the deaths of pretty much everyone he knows, but on the year anniversary of that fucking mental party he finds himself being hunted by the killer again because, you know, the killer is patient as fuck and is definitely willing to wait a year just to murk this guy.

The masked man on the patio isn’t that patient, unfortunately. He wishes he was, but he’s just never been one to pace himself like that. He wants the instant gratification of a massacre, wants to see the horrors splayed across newspapers for weeks, months to come. He doesn’t want to have to run around tying up loose ends a year from now, because really, that’s just how things go wrong, and things mustn’t go wrong here tonight because the setting is so _perfect_ , so _cliché_ , that he’ll never forgive himself if it does.

So, the masked man stands at the back-patio door, able to see the recklessness inside through the glass, but standing far enough in the shadow that no one will notice him (no one at these parties ever did notice him). It’s around one in the morning when people start to leave in drips and drabs, and he’s been outside for _ages,_ can feel his limbs growing weary and his joints seizing up, but he’s been here for so long that he can bear to wait a little bit longer (he’s waited what feels like an eternity for this, for the sweet taste of revenge, of _justice,_ and an hour or two is nothing in comparison).

It’s almost three am before the party has dwindled down to just the popular crowd – about a dozen people, all gorgeous and athletic and carefree, and god does the masked man hate them. People just like them had made his life hell for _years_ , and as much as he would like to go after the originals, that would be too risky, draw too much attention – and not the right kind. So instead he settles for the new generation of assholes, because they’re just as bad, and there’s probably a kid at their school who’s just as tormented as he was, and maybe he can make that kid’s life liveable. It’s worth it, he thinks, all these lives traded for one kid’s happiness, because really, the people in that house? They’re worthless. They’ve convinced themselves they’re the be-all and end-all, but they exist only to mock others, and for that they deserve to suffer, to feel the pain he felt – no, that the outcasts at their school felt. This isn’t about him or his past, he tells himself, this is about protecting those who can’t defend themselves.

This is about being someone’s saviour.

As the clock strikes three – the witching hour, our killer thinks with slight amusement, because maybe he wouldn’t mind being in the same boat as a demon from hell – he slips around the side of the building to where the telephone cable runs down the side of the house, slicing the cable carefully, quietly, leaving his victims sitting ducks. He then returns to the back patio, creeping along the side of the house, avoiding the windows, before opening the door and soundlessly stepping into the kitchen. The lights are off in here, room lit only by the light coming through the living room doorway, next to the hall doorway where one girl has been sitting for the best part of an hour, where he’s been watching her slump over her drink. He crosses over to her in nine steps, his footfalls unnoticeable, before kneeling on the ground beside her. It is easy to place the knife against her throat, easy to cut deep enough to watch her blood pour out, easy to drag the knife across her neck as she chokes and gurgles, putting up a futile fight with heavy limbs, noises and struggle drowned out by the Chainsmokers remix blasting from the next room over. She attempts to bat him away, to claw at the hand holding the knife, but her nails do no damage through his gloves and she is so weak, so drunk, that she couldn’t possibly overpower him.

The light leaves her eyes quickly. The poor girl never stood a chance.

This death is messy. Blood has cascaded down her chest, ruining her bright sundress. It drips onto the floor, a steady sound, puddling on the cold tile beneath her. If anyone were to turn the lights on they would know immediately what had happened. He is almost annoyed with himself, as he absent-mindedly notices how soft the girl looks in death, how she would look so much softer without her own gore streaked across herself, almost picture-perfect. But it’s no matter now. The past cannot be undone.

He has many more bodies to work on tonight, regardless. He cannot expect every death to be flawless. He must admit his mistakes and move on, which he does promptly by sneaking up the stairs beside the kitchen, still avoiding the partygoers. A drunk girl is passed out on the stairs, as expected, and wrapping his arms around her neck, squeezing tighter and tighter until he can feel her windpipe protesting, until he knows the life is draining from her while she’s too far gone to do anything about it - it feels as natural as breathing. He holds on for several long minutes, the muscles in his arms straining and screaming at him to release his grasp on her as he continues to exert more force upon her throat than he thought he was capable of. When he feels the pulse hammering against his forearm slow to a gentle throb, before finally dropping off into nothingness, he breathes a sigh of relief, disentangling himself from the corpse. This one is cleaner, he thinks, less obvious. He hopes this is the one they find first.

He arranges the body so her head is tilted downward against the wall, hiding the marks around her neck. It gives the illusion that she is still alive, and he giggles as he imagines the drunken frat boy who will inevitably try to hit on her, only to be met with dead silence.

His next move is creeping up the stairs, perhaps to find a couple in bed and therefore distracted. While the kitchen and stairs could be seen through the glass wall and patio doors taking up most of the back of the house, he was essentially blind as to the workings of the upstairs rooms and the front of the house. He had kept an eye on who went up and down the stairs though, and while maths was never his strong suit, he reckons there’s no more than five people up here – two couples and a girl by herself. He aims to find the girl first – distantly noticing there were far too many girls by themselves at this party, but yet again, it wasn’t like he had been to a lot of them to know what the standards were.

However, it’s not the girl he finds first, but a decidedly masculine groaning sound coming from behind an ajar door, the first he sees when he reaches the top of the stairs. He can barely hear it over the heavy EDM blaring out of the speakers downstairs, but it vaguely sounds like a boy lamenting his alcohol-sodden life choices, and when our killer looks through the gap in the door and sees a tiled wall, he comes to the conclusion that this is the bathroom, and the boy inside is therefore probably throwing up an entire life of regret.

Not that it’s going to be a long life of regret, but whatever.

Our killer gently nudges the door open with his foot, hoping to enter unnoticed, but this plan fails when the door catches on the Chunder King’s leg. Our killer freezes, expecting a shout, a fight, anything really, but only more groaning is heard, before the boy with his head down the toilet bowl whines, “Dude, I wanna die.”

In traditional snappy slasher fashion, our killer replies with, “Then your wish is my command,” before placing a hand on the back of the boy’s head and pushing his face further into the bowl. He understands this is a particularly disgusting way to die, literally drowning in your own vomit, but an opportunity has presented itself and he isn’t about to turn it down.

The boy struggles, clawing backwards towards the face of the man holding him down, legs kicking out in all directions in an attempt to dislodge his assailant, but the boy is shaky and weak from both ingesting the alcohol and expelling it from his system. His limbs flounder, scrabbling against the floor, hitting against the toilet roll holder which crashes against the floor with a clatter that would be deafening if the muffled, wet screams of the boy and the pounding music weren’t momentously louder. It takes only moments before he passes out, limp form still tipped into the toilet. He will not wake up in time to save himself, and so our killer simply walks out, kicking the boy’s legs away from the path of the door as he takes his leave.

This one could perhaps be considered an accident, a boy too drunk to stay conscious, and he is proud of this kill.

And now for the next.

The boy had stumbled upstairs with a girl on his arm, but she clearly wasn’t here now, so that left two girls alone up here somewhere. Our killer considers returning and waiting in the bathtub, behind the shower curtain, for someone to come in and see the scene, perhaps leap out and end them too, but he’s spent long enough waiting tonight, wants to spill more blood _now_.

As he steps back out into the hallway, softly shutting the bathroom door behind him, he pauses to figure out where to go next. This house is so big you could probably commit a murder on one side and they wouldn’t hear it on the other and –

Well, there was only one way to really find out how true that was.

Our killer begins trying rooms at random, attempting to find anyone to claim as his next victim. He would honestly prefer one of the girls, because having to deal with just the one person is easiest, but he’s going to have to kill the couple at some point and with how swimmingly everything’s been going, he may as well do it now, he supposes.

It is in the third room he tries that he finds the couple, out cold, naked, sprawled across the bed. They lie with their backs to one another, as if they each could not bear the notion of seeing the other when they woke up, and our killer decides they’re not a couple and they’ve most certainly made a drunken mistake. No matter – he’ll make sure they don’t have to face each other in the morning. A kindness, really.

As he moves further into the room, neither of them make even the tiniest movement. The only sounds to be heard are the quiet whispers of the breaths of the two on the bed, chests rising and falling rhythmically to match. He notices the music downstairs has stopped, and wonders when that happened, how he didn’t notice, because it was definitely playing when he drowned the boy, or was it? Does he actually remember that or did he imagine it? Did someone hear the crash of the toilet roll holder and pause the music to listen? Are they listening now, do they know what’s happened, have they come upstairs to check?

Our killer pauses, moving into the darkness behind the door, waiting for any noise outside, coming up the stairs. He should notice things like the music, because things like that make him all the more likely to be heard, and that means he needs to be quieter, more careful, stealthier.

He waits behind the door for several long, tense moments, constantly expecting a group of people to suddenly jump out at him from the hallway. After a period of unnerving silence that seems to stretch on beyond the minutes the wall clock indicates it has been, he breathes a sigh of relief. The silence is disconcerting after such loud music being played for so long, but perhaps the kids have decided to start winding down, are chatting softly amongst themselves or have moved outside –

Our killer freezes at the thought, his very joints seeming to lock together as his blood runs cold.

If they’ve moved outside, they’ve found the girl in the kitchen.

But there are no screams, no sounds of terror like he would expect, and he therefore dismisses the idea, most of the tension leaving his body as he realises he is working himself into a panic and he needs to stop that.

No one has noticed yet, but it won’t be long before they do, however, and so he should hurry this along.

He spots a large metal lamp on the bedside table on the girl’s side, and tiptoes around the bed to lift it. Its weight is heavy in his hand, comforting, the metal cool to the touch, his grip fitting around the lamp-head in a way he can only describe as just _right_.

It takes only five swift thumps before her skull caves completely in, blood splattering up the wall and all across the bedsheets, even flicking across the back of the boy sleeping next to her. He does not wake, however, and the killer walks around the bed, confident now, stopping before the boy. He lifts the lamp high before bringing the base down against the boy’s head, again and again and again and again, until he is unrecognisable, his once handsome face reduced to mush.

Our killer places the lamp down on the floor, moving to the foot of the bed to admire his work.

Their chests no longer rise and fall rhythmically.

Crimson has soaked the white bedsheets covering the two, with only their misshapen skulls visible. He is tempted to pull the sheets up over what were once their heads, but that would be affording them too much grace, too much dignity.

They don’t deserve his kindness. He has done more than enough for them by preventing an awkward morning-after encounter.

Our killer notices a mirror hanging on the wall opposite the door and steps towards it. Gore is splattered across his mask, his arms, his shirt. It is still warm, still thrumming with life even as the vessels that once held it grow cold. He is entranced by it, raises a hand to perhaps taste the very essence of life, when out of the corner of his eye, reflected in the mirror, there, a shadow –

He whips around to face the gap in the door, expecting someone watching him, someone who’ll raise the alarm and he can take one or two of them but not the remaining seven or so and he wanted them to know he was here but not like this and –

There is a creak on the floorboards beyond the partially open door, and nothing more.

But the adrenaline is pumping now, he can’t remain as calm as he had for almost the entire night, and he needs to get out now before something bad happens to him, fuck the other two girls up here, and oh god what if one of them saw him and they’re all waiting downstairs now, that would explain why the music stopped, and maybe they’ve just sent someone up here to check, and he’ll have to jump out the window and run but the fall would probably hurt him and –

He needs to breathe. He’s no use to himself when he’s panicking.

Our killer takes six deep breaths before slowly beginning to walk towards the door. He inches it open further, peering around it to see if there’s anyone in the corridor, and is met with nothing but closed doors.

But he didn’t imagine that shadow, and houses don’t creak for nothing.

Realising he has now become the teen lead in a bad horror movie, he steps into the corridor, deciding to check the sound out. He approaches the stairs, waiting for something, somebody, to jump out at him, but there’s nothing.

He tiptoes down the stairs, holding his breath as he waits for any sign of life from downstairs, the eerie silence settling in heavy around him, but still nothing.

And even as he reaches the bottom of the stairs, beside the kitchen he came in through, moments from freedom, there is still nothing.

And there should not be nothing.

There should be a girl, slumped against the wall, looking like she had simply fallen asleep. There should be a frat boy hitting on her before he realises he’s trying it on with a corpse.

There is nothing.

Our killer’s heart rate spikes again. Either he didn’t actually kill the girl and she woke up and alerted everyone, or someone found her and moved her body and alerted everyone. He doesn’t have time to wonder which – he needs to leave, and now.

He hurries to the kitchen, no longer caring about being quiet with the door so near, but he stops in his tracks when he sees the emptiness of the doorway.

The other girl is gone too.

He walks through the threshold, stepping into the blood he had spilt earlier, now dry and tacky under his soles. There are faint streaks leading towards the other doorway, which leads into the living room, and he risks a glance through to see a macabre scene before him, a twisted caricature of a social gathering.

There are seven people sitting around a table in the living room. At first glance, they appear to be friends relaxing together after a long night of partying, simply enjoying one another’s company before crashing for the night, slowly sobering up. At second glance, one is the girl he strangled, one is the girl whose throat he slit, and the other five, three girls and two boys, have been stabbed, if the spreading blood stains on their shirts are anything to go by. They have all been arranged to appear alive, and he can appreciate the artistry of that, can appreciate the way Jock McGee holds his girlfriend under his arm, the way the two girls he had killed were holding each other, the way they all leaned slightly towards each other as if sharing secrets.

Our killer wonders for a moment if they will tell the secret of who stabbed them, because it certainly wasn’t him.

He backs into the kitchen, scanning the entirety of the living room for the remaining two people – because there were three bodies upstairs, and seven here, and there were twelve people originally, he reckoned, so that meant there were about three people still around, and at least one of them had to have done this, had to have either decided to join in on his killing spree, or had already planned one which he interfered in, and either was a dangerous option.

Our killer turns when he is six steps into the kitchen, and he sees it before he feels it.

The very base of a silver blade peers up at him from between his ribs, where red begins to swell against his shirt, droplets falling upon the floor. Instinctively, he reaches for the wooden handle and yanks the knife from himself, revealing easily five inches of steel that had pierced his abdomen. It is then that the pain hits, an intense agony, feeling as if it is ripping his body apart around the wound. He raises shaky hands to apply pressure, feels a wave of nausea and dizziness crest upon him as even sharper torture brings him to his knees.

It is then that he notices the boy in front of him – Jock McGee’s Best Bro, standing in the pitch black of the kitchen, waiting for him. He is tanned and gorgeous, with dark hair meticulously styled into a quiff and a build that indicates he’s on the football team. This notion is further proven by his bright red letterman jacket, with ‘Ryan’ and ‘Football’ written in white on his right side. If it were not for the smile and the eyes, he would pass off as any popular jock. But here he stands before a murderer, someone who has killed his friends, someone who he has just stabbed, and he is _smiling_. He is smiling maniacally, the edges stretched almost too far, almost too many teeth showing, blindingly white. The smile does not reach his eyes, which remain cold, emotionless, eyes our killer has never seen in all his years, especially not on the face of a boy so young and _bright._

And yet the boy smiles down at him, with a gaze betraying how empty he is.

Our killer has not let a sound escape him, not even as his suffering heightened with each passing second, but he is beyond confused and simply must know what in the unholy fuck is going on here.

“W-what…”

Our killer is weak, but the boy seems to understand him, for he smiles even wider if that is possible as he says, “Hey man, big fan of your work here tonight, but you know, I was going ten for ten and you kinda ruined it, and I can’t exactly just let you go. No hard feelings though, right?”

The boy – Ryan – holds his hand out to our killer, as if to offer a handshake, to agree that all is said and done. This is the last thing he sees before another wave of agony sweeps over him and he closes his eyes.

He does not open them again.


	2. change

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shane confuses a dream for the beginnings of a nightmare.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fair warning: this is about 99% pure exposition but bear with me lmao

When Shane Madej decided he wanted to move from Chicago – where he had spent his entire life, where his family was, where he had gone to college – to LA, a four-and-a-half hour flight away, there were numerous concerns raised by, well, literally everyone he told. He knew nobody in LA and the company he worked for didn’t have a branch out there so he would essentially have to start anew, they said.

People didn’t seem to realise that their main argument against him leaving was exactly why he wanted to leave in the first place. Shane had gotten bored of his life, the monotony of it seeming to have seeped into his very bones, draining every little bit of energy and happiness he had. He was sick and tired of everything – of a job he didn’t like, of expectations he couldn’t meet, of crushing loneliness that just wouldn’t go away. And so people told him to just get a new job, go on more dates, meet new people, but he had tried all of it and nothing worked.

But LA – LA was something he hadn’t tried yet. LA had job prospects galore for anyone interested in film work, had an entirely different atmosphere, a bright new horizon Shane couldn’t wait to see.

So, against the wishes of pretty much everyone he knew, he started scouring the internet for his dream job and a new apartment.

After weeks of careful consideration and decision-making (read: desperately looking for anything, literally _anything_ , at one point even considering joining a cult and living out of some guy’s attic, if the Great Devil Whisperer would allow him), he finds a listing for an advertising company, looking for a video editor to start in four weeks. That is something Shane can do – not exactly what he wanted, but it’s a beginning, and the starting salary is good enough that he’s not willing to ignore it.

Finding this listing commences a series of bewilderingly fortunate events for Shane. He applies for the job, does a video interview, and gets a call to tell him he’s been hired all within a week, which is absolutely bonkers, but he’s not about to complain. A couple of days later, he finds another listing, this time for a gorgeous apartment with real hardwood floors and huge windows, in a relatively affluent area of the city. He had clicked on it solely out of curiosity, expecting the place to be well out of his realm of savings – he aimed for absolutely no more than $2200 a month, and this place, at first glance, looks like it’s going to be more than $3000.

Unfortunately, he falls in love with it the second he sees the pictures.

Fortunately, this feeling only grows when he sees the price: $2000 a month, about the cost of the average one-bed apartment in LA. Considering what’s on offer for the money, he couldn’t be more thrilled – it’s an absolute steal, and while there clearly must be something wrong with the apartment, he can’t bring himself to care yet.

So, Shane immediately calls the landlord and explains the slight issue that 2000 miles tends to present, half-expecting to be told to fuck away off. The landlord’s enthusiasm at Shane’s interest barely dwindles, though, and he offers to do a video tour of the apartment the next day. Skype details are exchanged and a time is set for Shane to lay eyes upon the place he’s been fantasising about.

The next day, during the skype call, Shane is awed by what he sees on his shitty phone screen. He asks all the questions that those advice websites tell you to ask when you’re looking to rent property, and the landlord responds with what sound like the right answers, except Shane doesn’t really speak property jargon so he just nods along. From what he can see and vaguely hear, the apartment is in sound shape – it apparently has no infestations of any sort, no mould problems, nothing like that. The guy seems nice enough that Shane trusts him, and he knows that California law is pretty big on habitable living conditions for tenants. The apartment is even better than in the pictures – all the rooms seem brighter and airier, and he can hear the satisfying clicking of the landlord’s shoes on the floor.

Given that the apartment is genuinely one of the most beautiful Shane has ever laid eyes upon, and that there’s apparently no problems, he can think of no reason for such a low price, and with his cynical nature, he knows something’s up. He can’t just ignore it as he had previously – that would be irresponsible, and Shane Madej is definitely a responsible adult. So, he does the default responsible adult thing as the tour draws to a close and points out this glaring issue.

“Listen, I have to ask: I’m sure you’re not a con-artist or anything, but this all sounds too good to be true. There’s gotta be a reason why you’re letting an apartment like this for $2000.”

The landlord, who had switched to selfie mode only seconds before, begins to look slightly uncomfortable. His gaze flickers around the room before settling on Shane, sighing deeply.

 _Oh,_ Shane thinks, _I definitely have to co-habit with college kids, and they’re gonna be partying all the goddamned time and I’ll have to sleep on the sofa and –_

“Well, the place comes unfurnished, so obviously that’s accounted for in the cost, and…”

The landlord trails off, seeming to struggle to force the rest of his sentence out of his mouth. Shane nods along, mimicking the ‘and’ with the same trail-off to encourage the landlord to hurry the fuck up.

“And… The last tenant committed suicide here eight months ago.”

Shane blinks, a little bit shell-shocked, because that means he won’t be sharing with college kids and that is one hell of a weight off his shoulders. He then nods, saying, “Well, alright then. Can you send me an application form?”

The landlord pauses, raising his eyebrows, before asking “That doesn’t bother you?” in the sort of tone that indicates it has bothered many, many people, and Shane actually feels bad for the guy because holy fuck, having such a lovely apartment lying empty for nine months because of dead dude vibes must be exhausting.

“Nah, someone’s probably died in most places more than fifty years old, it’s no big deal.”

The landlord nods frantically, before saying, “I’ll send you all the forms now and we’ll try to get this sorted as quickly as possible, then,” in such a rush that Shane barely catches it.

Shane returns the nod in a more measured fashion, agreeing while still moderately dumbstruck by the turnaround in the landlord’s demeanour. The two give the customary parting pleasantries, with Shane once again reminding the landlord that he would like to move in in two weeks, which should be fine because the last tenant doesn’t exactly need to move his stuff out, and they end the skype call.

An hour later, Shane receives an email with the application attached. He prints it off, fills it out, scans and sends it back the next day, and receives a call only hours later to tell him he can sign the lease whenever he wants.

Shane Madej is not one to believe in luck or any of that sort of thing, but goddamn does he feel lucky. He books his flight to LA for the week before he starts his new job, and hands in his notice of resignation to his boss. He has two months left on his lease in Chicago, but he couldn’t really give a shit because he’s made a steal in LA and he has decent savings from years at a job he can’t stand.

He books his cross-state moving company, internally crying at the cost and taking back his earlier thoughts about not giving a shit about money anymore, and prepares to break the news to his family.

* * *

They do not take it terribly.

They take it better than expected, which isn’t saying much, but they definitely don’t take it terribly.

His brother doesn’t see much of an issue; the two are close but don’t visit each other all that often in Chicago, so it doesn’t really matter where Shane is as long as he comes home occasionally.

His parents are, at first, a lot more apprehensive about the whole affair. Shane understands where they’re coming from – their youngest son is moving 2000 miles away from the only home he’s ever really known, going to a city where he has no connections. He imagines that he would be exactly the same in their shoes, especially as it’s coming across as a fairly spur-of-the-moment decision.

When he tells them, there’s a plethora of questions thrown about, most of which Shane can’t even pretend to know the answer to, which clearly unsettles his parents, because he really hasn’t planned this shit out. There’s tears and some raised voices, but eventually they seem to realise Shane is dead-set on this, because they switch to making demands about how often he must call home and how he needs to come back for the holidays. Shane laughs and nods and agrees because really, he doesn’t mind all that much – he loves his parents dearly, thinks they’re absolute saints, and understands that they’re just concerned for his wellbeing.

He returns to his apartment that night with his parents’ blessing and a weight off his shoulders. It is with renewed vigour and a sense of purpose that he begins packing the next morning.

* * *

The next two weeks pass in a blur. There’s a farewell party at his workplace that only cements his choice, and his life is boxed away, leaving his apartment empty and impersonal. It looks exactly the same as when he first moved in, and he can’t help but feel saddened that he has left no mark on the place. It’s almost like he was never there at all.

Three days before his flight, he loads all his crap – books and furniture and general household items – into the shipping truck he’s rented, which will hopefully arrive the evening of his flight to LA. He moves in with his parents for the next few nights, given that his apartment is now empty, and they drive him to the airport on the morning of his departure, sending him off with an emotional farewell, filled with hugs and promises to text as soon as he lands. Shane will never admit it, but he sheds a few tears as he walks away from his parents, the immensity of what he’s doing finally catching up with him. He is walking into the unknown, taking an absolute leap of faith, and for a man who prides himself on his logic, that’s a pretty illogical thing to do. The thought makes him smile as he swans about duty free once he’s cleared security, buying a bottle of whisky and another of water because why not, before his flight is called.

He sleeps on the flight and arrives in LA absolutely abuzz. He doesn’t have to go through baggage as he’s only carrying hand luggage – he just needs to survive a few hours without his crap, after all. He barely has time to think and text home before he’s in a taxi on the way to his new apartment, and then he’s meeting his landlord and signing his lease, and then he’s got his keys and he’s unlocking the front door, stepping into his apartment for the very first time.

It’s even better than he expected.

The door opens into a hallway that is barely an alcove in the wall, before leading to an open-plan kitchen on his left, with what is presumably meant to be a living room on his right. The kitchen is quite compact, with wooden cupboards and granite worktops, but it strikes Shane as more cosy than small. The living-room-to-be has a large window on either side, letting light fill the apartment in a way that makes Shane want to buy those flimsy half-transparent net curtains that move in the slightest breeze.

The bedroom lies behind the kitchen, and the bathroom beyond the living room. The two doors face each other, separated by another window. He knows from the photos that the bedroom has a narrow balcony, overlooking the street, and that the bathroom is quite sizeable, with the bath and shower being separate from one another.

He's even deeper in love with the apartment than he thought was possible.

The sound of the hardwood floor beneath his shoes is so satisfying, and he’s sorry to his neighbours below for the incessant clicking they’re going to hear for the next few days, but he honestly doesn’t care that much. The apartment is on the fourth floor, with the windows providing a brilliant view onto the streets down below, and he is genuinely in awe at how lucky he’s gotten.

Shane notes that there is a faint odour in the air, however. It takes him a moment to identify it, but when he does he realises it’s a stale scent, like that of decay. He doesn’t want to go as far as to say the smell of death, because the last tenant died nine months ago and the place definitely should have been aired out since then, but it can’t be far off. He makes a mental note to open the windows as soon as the landlord has left.

The landlord who has been acting strangely shifty since Shane arrived, especially now that they’re in the apartment. As Shane had walked on in to look around the kitchen, the landlord had stayed in the hallway alcove, almost as if frozen, his eyes darting around the room.

 _Odd,_ Shane thinks, _mighty fucking odd._

“Everything alright?”

The landlord jolts as if Shane had jumped out at him, before shaking his head frantically, making erratic hand gestures that don’t actually seem to mean shit.

“No, uh, I’m just – yaknow, just – I knew the guy who lived here before.”

Shane nods slowly, eyebrow raised, because of course he did, the guy was his fucking tenant, but that’s not a polite thing to say in the dead dude’s old apartment.

“I’m sorry, were you close?”

The landlord’s jaw seems to drop before he resumes his frenzied head-shaking, and Shane has to question if this is the only style of head movement the man has.

“Oh no, no, rarely saw him, never spoke, no! I didn’t have much to do with him at all really!” he exclaims emphatically, as if desperate to prove his lack of association with the previous tenant.

Shane isn’t entirely sure what the fuck is going on but he _is_ entirely sure that he doesn’t care enough to ask for any clarification. At this point, he just wants to unpack what he can of his carry-on and wait for his moving truck to arrive so he can finally settle into the place he’s been dreaming about. And maybe go grab some food, because he is _starving._

“Well, uh, everything seems to be as expected. I’ll call you if I have any problems?” Shane doesn’t know why he phrases that as a question, but it seems to have the desired effect anyway as the landlord begins backing towards the door, nodding.

“Yeah, contact me anytime, if you need help with anything!”

“Alright, will do…”

Shane watches as the landlord pauses on the threshold, glancing around one last time before giving a stunted nod in Shane’s general direction and finally leaving the apartment, shutting the door on his way.

 _That wasn’t strange at all,_ Shane thinks, musing over why his landlord would be behaving like…

Someone scared.

 _Scared of what, though?_ He wonders, giving the area a thorough examination, looking for anything abnormal, anything the landlord maybe didn’t want him to notice.

Nothing – the apartment is perfect from what he can see. You’d never know someone had died here, and –

_Oh, wait a minute._

That’s when Shane realises his landlord is probably afraid of ghosts, and he can’t help the choking laugh that escapes his lips at the revelation. He almost wants to call the man out on his ridiculous fear, because ghosts aren’t real, but there’s potential that this is another reason for the bargain he’s currently getting, so it needn’t be brought up.

Hell, he’s now officially decided to casually mention stereotypical ‘haunted’ house occurrences every time he sees the landlord, just to make sure the rent doesn’t get jacked up at the end of his lease.

 _That is, if I even have to fake it – I could have some really spooky ghosties here!_ Shane thinks sarcastically, still chuckling to himself as he places his duty-free whisky in what he has designated his liquor cabinet.

* * *

 

In the evening, Shane unloads all of his belongings from his moving truck and, over the next four days, he unpacks dozens of boxes of crap he doesn’t need but was too sentimental to leave behind. He watches as, bit by bit, the apartment looks less like a showroom and more like a home. His teapot sits on his stove, his blankets decorate his sofa, and his jackets hang by his door. As he gazes around, he can’t believe how much fortune has favoured him with his new start, and he makes sure to take some time to enjoy the city before he starts work on Monday, even going as far as to hop on one of those sight-seeing buses. He has decided that this is where he was meant to be. Everything seems to be turning out perfectly for him, and he can’t help but be filled with hope for his life here in LA.

Unfortunately, things rarely stay so dream-like for long. After all, nightmares are only ever a sunset away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im not exactly content with the pacing and atmosphere of this but i just wanted to get the sort of scene-building aspect out of the way before we get to the Juicy Business, which should hopefully start up next chapter  
> ive planned this out and i reckon there's gonna be about seven or eight chapters so ye im not in this for the long haul  
> as always, any support is greatly appreciated and thank you all so much for your lovely comments! im over on tumblr @theumbrellamancan if you wanna chime off at me bro


	3. wrong

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You know you have a problem when The Void wants to be cuddle buddies.

The first time something odd happens is when Shane returns home from his first day of work, a week after moving in. It had been a surprisingly enjoyable day – his co-workers had turned out to be absolutely lovely, deciding to take him out for drinks at the regular after-work haunt to celebrate his new job. He had gotten along well with all of them, partially because of their kindness but mainly because of the drink, and had ended up leaving the bar at one in the morning, expecting a hangover and not particularly caring.

In his comfortable state of tired yet pleasantly buzzed, he almost doesn’t notice that there’s something wrong in his apartment. He doesn’t even really realise what’s wrong until he collapses on the sofa, legs too unsteady for him to bother dragging his ass to bed. At first, all he feels is a general sense of unease, but then he recognises the source.

A memory slips to the forefront of his mind, one aged and dusty, long-forgotten until this moment. When he was a child of maybe fourteen or fifteen, his brother had played a prank on him by moving every piece of furniture in the house two or three inches out of place. The difference had been subtle, near invisible given the minute change, but it had still been _wrong,_ had still felt _wrong._ He had been so accustomed to the original layout that he didn’t pay attention to where he was going and so Shane had stubbed his toes off nearly every item of furniture, stumbled against tables and knocked ornaments over for the next three days until he got used to the change.

His apartment dredges up this memory, and the feeling that comes with it – the sensation that everything is just ever so slightly out of place. He glances around the living room, and he notices it now. The TV seems closer to the left window than the right. The coffee table is just the tiniest bit too far from the sofa. The laptop is perched nearer to the edge of the table than he remembered leaving it.

As he looks around his apartment, he notices the placement of almost every item he can see is just ever so slightly erroneous. A feeling settles deep in his gut, something beyond simple unease, something dipping into the territory of dread as he feels the hair on the back of his neck prickle and a thought he can’t quite concentrate on niggles at the back of his mind.

But he dismisses his gut feeling.

He is drunk, and tired, and he’s only been in this apartment for seven days, only been fully unpacked for three so he couldn’t possibly be completely adapted to its layout. He chalks the uncomfortable sensation up to the late hour and the darkness blanketing him and the way he can barely keep his eyes open and the drink fogging his mind. It makes no sense that everything he owns would have been moved ever so slightly, and therefore it didn’t happen.

He drifts off to sleep, not noticing the crack in the glass of the family photo on the shelf.

When he does spot it two days later, he will take note of the way the crack is such that it separates him, the left-most person in the picture, from the rest of his family. That feeling will rise in his gut again, a general discomfort and fear he can’t seem to pinpoint the exact cause of, before he’ll put it down to damage caused during moving that he simply didn’t notice until now. He will once again dismiss his gut.

A few weeks later, he will regret it.

* * *

 

The second time something odd happens is less one strange occurrence and more a series of them. One morning, into his second week at a job he’s found to be actually quite interesting, is starting to see as a long-term career rather than just work to tide him over, he goes to put on his cologne, before realising it’s not on his chest of drawers. He looks through each drawer hurriedly, concerned about running late. When the bottle doesn’t make an appearance, he decides to find it later and instead rushes out the door.

He returns home that evening and resumes his hunt for the cologne, upending every drawer and going so far as to pull the chest of drawers away from the wall in case the bottle had fallen down the tiny gap and somehow not smashed to pieces. He doesn’t understand why his search is so fervent – it’s just cologne – but something in his gut is telling him he needs to find it, that something oh so terrible will happen if he doesn’t, and so he desperately searches.

He eventually finds the bottle on the kitchen counter when he decides to pause the hunt to make dinner. He holds it in his hand and stares at it in confusion, trying to connect non-existent dots. Shane cannot understand having his cologne in the kitchen for any reason – in fact, he could swear he distinctly remembers leaving it on the chest of drawers the day before, but here it is. He puts the bottle back where it belongs and gets on with dinner, ignoring the little voice at the back of his head telling him that he’s not misremembering things.

The same thing occurs with a variety of items over the course of the week, some disappearing for a day, others for three, and most showing up in places that make no sense. He finds his favourite flannel in the broom cupboard. A book he’s had for years and hasn’t read in months migrates from the living room shelf to the bathroom counter. His toothbrush ends up on his bed.

Each vanishing belonging creates an increased sense of unease in its absence, as if his body is taking the space once filled with the items in question and turning it into discomfort within himself. His stomach weighs him down with a vague nausea every time he notices something missing, and the little voice keeps telling him that he hasn’t been moving his own things around.

He ignores his stomach and the voice. It’s probably stress, really, and maybe some tiredness – he’s starting an entirely new life and while he feels completely fine, that doesn’t necessarily mean he is. He could very easily just be getting forgetful and leaving things in strange places when he gets distracted or something.

Because if he didn’t, who did?

* * *

 

The third time something odd happens is one night after he’s been in his apartment for a little over three weeks. He has grown used to things mysteriously vanishing now, and no longer bothers to question why there’s a knife on the living room floor or why his favourite family photo is in the bathtub. It has simply become another facet of Shane’s life: his things go missing and then eventually they’re just not missing anymore. It’s a little annoying, yes, but he assumes that once he’s properly settled in, has completely gotten the hang of his new job and has developed a close circle of friends, everything will go back to normal.

That is until he wakes up at some unholy hour with a dry mouth and a feeling like something is just ever so slightly _off._ Shane assumes he must have had a pretty funky dream – not funky enough to stay in his memory, but just funky enough to unsettle his waking mind. He sits up to take a couple of sips of water from the glass on his bedside table, noticing his hand shaking violently as he does. He realises his heart is hammering away inside his chest, which is where Shane wants his heart to be but not the way he wants it to behave. When he sets the glass down, he makes to slide back under the covers, but finds himself completely unwilling to, as if his body knows that something bad will happen if he lets himself be vulnerable. Shane sits up for several long minutes, staring at the door for reasons he is unaware of, simply gazing at the bronze handle and waiting for it to turn ever so slightly, to let something in he knows he doesn’t want to deal with.

He decides he’s has a nightmare, that the terror of whatever dream Shane just faced has settled into his own head, but that means the fear is irrational and he should just go to sleep. He forces himself to slip back into bed, telling himself everything is fine and yet still finding himself staring towards the door from an awkward angle on his pillow, before he decides he’s being a fucking idiot.

He rolls onto his side to get comfortable, noticing absently that the shadow in the far corner of his room, to the right of the door and opposite the balcony, seems strangely deep, considering the faint light coming in through the glass doors. He can’t figure out what’s creating the shadow – there’s nothing between it and the light, and the vague shape of it doesn’t match anything in the room.

While he contemplates this, Shane feels the discomfort in his bones grow, and slowly becomes aware of the reason for his unease –  the vague, distant sense that he is being watched. He cannot recall when he first felt this sensation tonight, but it is all too present now, having been lying at the back of his head like a faithful old dog, waiting to be given attention.

He lies awake watching the shadow until his alarm cuts through the silence of the morning. He can’t help but notice that the shadow seems to flicker a few times throughout the night, as if moving, and that it barely seems to fade with the dawn light, growing only slightly more translucent as his room is slowly illuminated.

Shane gets up out of bed to make coffee he knows he’s going to need today, and when he returns to his room to get dressed after his shower, the shadow is gone.

* * *

 

The shadow appears every night after that, but never before he goes to sleep, and every night Shane dismisses it as a trick of the light, or lack thereof, and a result of tiredness from regularly waking up at the most god-forsaken of hours because of whatever fucked up dreams he’s having, which he in turn blames on stress. The little voice in the back of his head constantly reminds him that during the daytime, at work especially, he’s the most relaxed he’s been in years, but the little voice is usually told to shut the fuck up because it simply must be wrong.

Within a week, Shane is used to the shadow, can fall back asleep at fuck o’clock in the morning, goes to sleep earlier when he can so that the interruption doesn’t take so much out of him.

It’s around then that things get worse.

When he wakes up one night, he feels a presence in the room with him, feels the vague sense of unease that comes with being watched. He does his best to keep his breathing slow and even, and half-opens his eyes, trying not to give away his wakefulness lest the intruder realise. He is looking towards the shadow in the corner again, except it seems closer than it has on any previous night, and Shane watches with horror as it appears to come closer still. He goes to rub his eyes, convinced he’s imagining the stilted, jerky movement of the darkness, as if it inhabits a body it has never walked in before, but he then comes to a realisation that makes his heart stop beating within his chest.

He cannot move.

His eyes can dart around the room, his lids can shut, his lungs can expand, but his fingers and hands and all his limbs refuse to cooperate. He cannot even move his head as the shadow that once made its home in the corner of his room approaches slowly, and he finds he cannot tear his gaze away. The shadow eventually stands over him, an imposing mass of black even against the darkness of the room, vaguely humanoid in form, before it seems to lean over and lay itself against him, without ever discernibly changing shape.

Shane can feel goosebumps raising across his body where the shadow is in contact with him, along with a faint frigidness, the sort one would associate with a chilly draft coming in a window, except it’s spring in California and the windows are all locked tight. The shadow shifts, moving to lie almost fully on top of him. He can feel its weight pushing down against him, making it harder and harder to breathe, and his heart starts pounding against his ribcage with just how _real_ the sensation feels, as if the shadow has taken on an actual physical form.

The shadow remains above him for a time Shane cannot guess the length of, too terrified to know if it’s been a minute or an hour. The temperature upon his skin drops from uncomfortably cold to near unbearably icy, as if all the heat is being sucked from his body. The entire time Shane can feel the compression of his chest, occasionally gasping for air as he struggles to move his frozen body, to do anything to make the shadow and the cold and the weight go away.

After an indeterminable time, the shadow shifts above him and seems to roll to the side of the bed, before it rises slowly and returns to its corner of the room, its movements slightly more natural as if it is coming to terms with its form. Once in the corner it appears to turn as if watching Shane, who feels a strong wave of exhaustion crash down upon him before he passes out.

The only thing he notices before this is that, where cold had once settled against his skin, it feels almost warm, like a seat a few minutes after someone’s been sitting in it for an hour.

He wakes in the morning, still with fatigue settled deep into his bones, and takes note of the shadow, in the corner, looking completely innocent and normal as it does every morning. It remains even as Shane opens the curtains and looks down at the world below, as it does every morning. He gets out of bed and makes his coffee, and when he returns to his room the shadow has disappeared, as it does every morning.

Shane spends his lunch hour googling sleep paralysis and how to prevent it, coming to the conclusion that there’s really not much he can do, other than improve his sleeping habits (which had obviously suffered recently) and hope it goes away with time. But the knowledge that what happened the night before does fit in with the symptoms of sleep paralysis, that there is indeed a medical explanation for it, settles his mind a little.

He ignores the voice in the back of his head screaming that it’s not sleep paralysis, it was too _real._ Because, after all, shadows don’t move.

* * *

 

The nights where Shane is affected by sleep paralysis (or ‘sleep paralysis’, as the little voice puts it) are sporadic. It happens three more times over the course of a fortnight, each time with the shadow’s gait becoming more graceful, more like a human and less like a creature from a horror movie, and Shane then feeling complete exhaustion before passing out. He isn’t sure which he prefers, struggling to sleep because of the shadow or passing out because of it, but either way he’d kill for a decent night’s sleep right about now.

Beyond that, the next time something odd happens, he wakes up just before three in the morning, mouth dry and vision hazy, and he swears that he hears a creak on the floor. He ignores it at first, because buildings make noises sometimes and it’s nothing to write home about. Then it happens again, the sound lingering, stretching out as if someone was taking a step forward, slowly putting their weight onto their leading foot, hoping not to get caught. Shane listens as he hears the sound another time, and another, each instance pushing up his heartrate a little more. It is then that he slips out of bed and softly tip-toes over to his bedroom door, grabbing his baseball bat from beside the doorway, because as someone living alone, you can never be too careful.

He hears the creak again, and he places his hand on the door handle, preparing himself to wrench the door open and confront whoever’s in his home. He can’t help but notice how strange it is to try to rob an apartment, because if Shane screams his neighbours will hear him. But right now, that’s not the most pressing concern – the creep in his hallway is.

Shane takes a moment to breathe deeply, to steady his nerves. He tries not to psyche himself out with thoughts about guns and murderers and his chances of winning a fight, and instead just flings the door open before he can talk himself out of it, baseball bat ready to swing –

There is no one there.

Shane keeps the bat raised above his head as he steps out into the hallway, faintly illuminated by the glow of the streetlights coming through his flimsy curtains.

Nothing.

He softly treads into the living room, scanning every nook and cranny for any signs of disturbance.

Nothing.

He even checks the bathroom for good measure, and every cupboard, and all the windows, and he sticks his head out his front door to see if there’s anyone running down the hall.

Nothing.

He locks the door again, double- and triple-checks the windows and the deadbolt, before returning to his room, looking over his shoulder every few seconds because something just seems _off_. He clambers back into bed, laying his bat down beside him, holding it near like a lifeline. He tries to go back to sleep, telling himself that it was just the building creaking because that’s what they do, but the little voice in his head is back and says he knows better than that, and he can’t seem to shake the unease settled heavy in his gut. He settles into a fitful sleep as the first rays of dawn come through the window, illuminating the corner of the room where the shadow seems as strong as ever.

In the morning, running on coffee and pure determination, Shane puts a sticky note on the fridge to remind himself to ask the landlord about creaky wooden floors and what to do about them. When he comes home, he doesn’t notice the note now lying in his kitchen bin, and he forgets about the creaking altogether.

That is, until the next night, and the night after, and the night after that. In fact, the creaking continues for several nights, always around three am, always stopping when Shane opens his bedroom door. One night, when he decides to just stay in bed, the creaking goes on for hours. He feels like he is being taunted, like whatever is making the noise is saying _look at you, look at what I can do when you’re too scared to open the door,_ and it would be right, because fear has clawed its way up Shane’s throat every time he’s laid awake listening to the noises beyond his room.

The shadow in the corner of his room has been growing too, he’s noticed. It’s now beyond just an absence of light – it feels more like an _absorption_ of it, like even if he shone a flashlight at it the darkness would still be there. It’s a touch unnerving, to say the least, staring into the void on a nightly basis, especially as it seems to be staring back.

He reckons, with the way the shadow has been ‘getting on’ recently (how a shadow has behaviour he’ll never understand), it’s only so long before The Void will start speaking to him, and that’s when Shane is really going to have problems – but that would only confirm his theory that he’s imagining the abyss in the corner of the room, because shadows simply don’t work like this one does.

He has thankfully only had one incident of sleep paralysis, though, since the creaking began (he doesn’t know when that became something to be thankful for), so the shadow strikes slightly less terror into him in the middle of the night than it previously had. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he isn’t lying awake most nights, choking on his fear as his own home seems to turn against him.

After weeks of putting up with the creaking and the shadow and his things constantly going missing, he decides he’s had enough. He’s been running on caffeine all week, getting four hours of bad sleep a night if he’s lucky, and exhaustion is starting to wear him down. He reckons that’s probably why the shadow is worsening – he’s tired and his mind is playing tricks on him, which means he can’t sleep, and he finally understands how fucking annoying it must be to be one of those snakes eating their own tail.

Shane considers himself a sensible, logical man, and so he blames what he privately describes as his auditory and visual hallucinations and memory loss issues on a combination of stress, from moving two thousand miles away and getting a new job, sleep deprivation, worsened by the hallucinations, and maybe minor dehydration and malnutrition too. He’s struggled to look after himself for the past while, with his bone-deep exhaustion meaning he usually can’t be assed eating dinner or breakfast, subsisting most days on coffee.

When his colleagues start to ask if he’s feeling alright and seem genuinely concerned, Shane decides enough is enough. He books himself in for a half-day on Friday, and makes a doctor’s appointment for the same day, somehow getting an afternoon slot despite it only being a few days away. He is sick and tired, so goddamned tired, of what’s going on in his head, of having so much going on beyond his control. He wants it fixed, and he knows he’s going to need professional help for it, whatever _it_ is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I! Am! So! Sorry! For the delay in getting this chapter up omg  
> I had a major piece of coursework due so I was dedicating all of my time to that and then this chapter just wasn't really coming out the way i wanted it to  
> But I'm on study leave now so yay  
> So ye as always any support is appreciated and im on tumblr over @theumbrellamancan come yell at me im sad and lonely  
> And also thank you so much to everyone who's left kudos or comments you're an absolute legend

**Author's Note:**

> imma just... leave this here  
> (also if you notice any mistakes pls tell me so i can cry and if you spot the puns i'll appear in your room doing the macarena)


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